I think the primary point here is that interruptions don't only happen externally, but also internally. I think this point is a bit obscured by the article's use of this "fragmented thinking" terminology, which it does not do a good job of defining before building an argument on top of it. (I found myself searching for those words to see if I had missed the definition.)
However, I do think this is an insightful point! I think these "internal interruptions" are indeed a big problem for me, and one I don't think about nearly as much, but will try to more now that I've read this article.
The frustrating thing about external interruptions is the inability to control them. Things like turning off notifications and putting on headphones are mechanisms to reduce that frustration by imposing control over those interruptions.
The good news for these internal interruptions is that it should be much easier to control them. But it requires being aware of the problem! So I'm thankful to this article for making this more top of mind for me.
I'll admit I also had a chuckle at the expense of the parent post here (I'm sorry - the rest of this post isn't meant to pick on you or describe you specifically). I think this there is a lesson in here somewhere on the intellectual confidence that comes with being good at one thing, and the silliness that can ensue when it might not translate elsewhere. Not in even necessarily in a malicious or foolish way, but in a "it can catch you even when you think you're accounting for it" kind of way.
If not empathy for the sake of moral reasons or even good vibes, I wish that we could at least convince the "I read the abstract of 3 papers / I read a gwern post about this / I accomplished something hard in my life so I know everything" crowd of the utility of empathy as a tool for exploring your "unknown unknowns". You'd think that more people would be interested in a dialectic (in the classical philosophy sense) discussion as a cooperative if conflicting search for truth. This is harder to do if you systematically overestimate yourself and underestimate others. Of course as I write this I'm thinking of all the times I didn't practice what I'm preaching now.
I'm not sure if you're expressing what you think you are. They outlined a group by nature of the problem (so the people in question have something to improve, tautalogically), so it's not like they are painting with an overly broad brush, unless you think people that accomplished something hard and then automatically assume they have faculty in all topics is not a group in need of examining their assumptions more closely?
I don't think it is, which is my point. It's essentially saying "I wish people with BEHAVIOR PROBLEM would do THING THAT MAY HELP MITIGATE PROBLEM." There is no statement of the size of that group, or how many people exhibit that problem. Unless you don't think the behavior being talked about is a problem (which is different than thinking not many people have this problem), then I'm not sure how having empathy towards them factors in. Is wishing they had more perspective and could avoid a cognitive pitfall not empathy?
My contention is that I make a good faith effort to be open to the idea that others know or have experienced things or might have some thoughts that I haven’t considered adequately. And that I think this concept would be helpful to others here. That’s all, no more, no less.
It isn’t that I’m perfect, or infallible, or even immune to frustration and the occasional bout of snark. It doesn’t mean that I’m a “better” person. It also doesn’t mean that I have to accept every viewpoint as true or equally likely. Nor does it mean that I can’t criticize. Nor that I can’t take a side on a considered opinion. It doesn’t mean that this always leads to perfect results or that I’m always successful. It doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect heuristic. It’s only one more tool in a toolbox.
I think it is undervalued - and sometimes angrily pushed back against - in this community, maybe because it gets dismissed as “feelings” (and not “reason”). The reason I think this is that I've encountered here the “experienced expert with healthy self doubt versus passionate amateur with little self awareness” dynamic in action over and over again.
There’s an ongoing, half century current in the field trying to examine whether reasoning may often involve a heuristic-based, adaptive process based on incomplete and imperfect information, and less so something resembling a pure application of formal logic.
In this universe, cognitive biases extend more clearly to things like which facts you consider as possible at all in the first place and by which methods you weight them as more or less likely or influential, as opposed to merely fallacies of formal logic that we’re most often exposed to. So, the thinking goes, it can help to try to fill some gaps in this area by trying to increase the breadth of what you’re exposing yourself to and allowing yourself to take into account.
In my experience this can be a frustrating and exhausting concept to contend with as a person. You certainly can tu quoque yourself - or me, like you and others in this thread have - into oblivion. After all, what business do I have talking about cognitive biases if I've been shown to be subject the very same, and am not an expert in it? I don't know where the line is but I'm not certain it makes the concept less helpful outright. At the very least I don't think I'm claiming something that'd be considered very controversial as far as I'm aware.
Please continue preaching empathy and self awareness. But please practice them also.
Your interpretation of sanderjd's comment was uncharitable and incorrect.[1] Saying you had a chuckle at their expense was condescending and added nothing.
zmgsabst's reply to you was rude. But it was a challenge to reflect. No one suggested you thought you were perfect. No one suggested your stumble disproved the utility of empathy. You wrote paragraphs against straw men.
Please receive criticism from others as you want others to receive criticism from you.
OP’s remark just reminded me of something more general not necessarily in that remark that really has been bothering me. It wasn't very clear that I was going off on a tangent, and I tried to keep it lighthearted in a hamfisted way that ended up being more condescending than I intended, and then I got more defensive about it than I should when it wasn’t received well. Sorry about that - thanks for keeping me honest.
For what it's worth, when I (the author of that first comment) first read your comment, my thought was "wait, how is this responsive to what I wrote?". But now I've read this whole thread, and while I do think it was a bit of a tangent not super directly related to what I wrote, I have found it interesting and reflective in a positive way. And I agree with your broad point about empathy and such.
I've mentioned in a few comments now that the point I wanted to make (which I clearly did a poor job of), is that it's obviously easier to deal with only "internal interruptions", rather than both those and "external interruptions" additionally. You don't get to choose between the two, because the "internal interruptions" will exist regardless of how well you've managed to control "external interruptions".
Well I think you catalyzed a fantastic meta conversation!
I wonder if it's really as simple as your theory though...I don't disagree as a generalization, but perhaps certain classes of internal issues can be bypassed/moderated by external stimulus?
It's certainly not an uninteresting question! But personally I think the answer is "no". I think getting interrupted externally makes it strictly harder for me to manage my own internal distractions. Which doesn't mean it is universally bad though, to be clear! There are other important things, even far more important things, than individual productivity. But from the perspective of "is it easier or harder for me to get my individual contributions done if I'm left entirely alone or if I'm pinged about things frequently", I really think the answer is that it's always worse to be fielding communications.
I think there are some education maybe... take for example a gong ringing periodically in the background , this is an example of an external interruption that can be beneficial for addressing internal out of control thinking.
This is getting well outside the initial discussion (in some ways, but not all), but it's interesting.
Not easy, easier! For "external interruptions", you have to do both things, keep people from bugging you and control your own mind. I think it's definitely easier to only do one of the two, despite still being really hard.
It's actually easier to control your external environment than your internal environment. If interruptions or distractions are like a monkey hopping around, then at least with an external monkey you can put it outside and lock the door. With an internal monkey you're stuck with it. Drugs help but come with side effects; meditation helps but takes concerted long-term effort separate from work. (And it's hard to motivate yourself in addition to your already long workday to improve your performance during said workday.)
Yes, but again, the point I intended to make was that if you don't have to spend time controlling your external environment, then you only have to focus on what's going on with yourself. But if you do have to put time into controlling things externally, you still have to focus on those internal things. Being interrupted more externally doesn't make your internal struggles easier, it only gives you less time for them.
Say that I'm working on some fairly big fairly sprawling and cross-cutting effort, and I'm having trouble getting it done efficiently because I keep going down unnecessary refactoring rabbit holes, or getting distracted while waiting for end-to-end tests to run. I can (and do) experience these issues with a wide open schedule, notifications silent, and a home office with zero external interruptions. But now say I am getting frequent high-urgency pings about various other things that I need to research and dig into. When I pop each of those off the stack, I'm just back to my rabbit-hole strewn slow-to-test mess, but now it's just later in the day with less time before I have to pick up the kids or before the next scheduled meeting, or whatever else. I'm still dealing with all the same internal issues, just with less time and more anxiety.
But it's very clear that I did not make this point well at all in my original post.
You can put an external monkey outside and lock the door if you have a door and your boss doesn't tell you you to allow the monkey. Some internal monkeys can be tamed with simple habits.
Not everyone can form "simple habits", especially when they have monkeys running around their brain. For external monkeys, there are always some solutions that have little ongoing costs - negotiation, ANC headphones, office hours, telling the monkey to GTFO. Can't tell your own brain to shut up.
GP did not say that "everyone can form "simple habits." That's a strawman version of their position.
Emphasis mine:
> Some internal monkeys can be tamed with simple habits.
If you dismiss the advice because it's not universally applicable, I think you do yourself and others a disservice.
I have some very bad ADHD that I have worked for years to control (using tools ranging from medication to meditation/mindfulness, etc). I fully agree that the monkeys in your brain can't be fully tamed, but surely you would agree that there is at least something that most people can do to improve things even a little bit? It's definitely hard, but not impossible.
I like to say "just" for things like this :) In the sense that, this really is the answer, but the devil is in the details. (Usually in this same way of implying that it approaches pointlessness to even mention the thing you "just" need to do.)
Obviously it's easier than dealing with external interruptions. I don't suppose you do your hippie calming exercises while bob from accounting tries to get information from you for the 5th time this hour.
This is wonderfully naive. You can fairly easily learn to control Bob though articulated speech or just leave. Controlling the internal is the central focus of most world religions, and not being able to do it is responsible for most suffering on earth. We are mostly helpless cognonauts.
But again, controlling Bob is in addition to controlling the internal. It's additive, not a replacement of a harder thing with an easier one. And if you feel time pressure, as I often do, any time spent controlling those external distractions just leaves you with less time to work through the real issues, and thus more anxiety, such that the final level of difficulty is even greater than the sum of the parts.
Respectfully disagree, controlling the internal and controlling bob are parallel at best, they are not binary states.
No one (other than possibly the sprinkling of humans who have achieved enlightenment or someone temporarily under a heavy dose of psycho-motor stimulants) can fully control themselves internally. Minor, fleeting internal control occurs frequently. Being able to sum up the strength to initiate the process of planning and acting to perform directed speech to control Bob would be an example of this (and appropriate for your additive example) but the full state of internal control required to disconnect your senses and observation from Bob's incoming external interferences without impacting your own faculties or performance is a rare kind, or 'level' of internal control that many do not possess. Interestingly, this is all derivative of personality.
They might be "parallel" if there were no zero-sum time trade off, or no time pressure. I wouldn't mind so much spending time fielding interrupts all day every day, if I didn't have anything else I was trying to get done. But that's not the reality. And for me (and I think many others), it isn't just additive, because time pressure makes me anxious and less focused, which slows me down more, which increases the time pressure, which makes me more anxious, etc.
By the way, I'm not trying to say that this is always happening in my work, or even frequently, but this is an actual bad outcome that I experience from time to time. I currently have, and have been fortunate in my career to usually have very good management and teammates who are very respectful of each other's focus time.
From the article, a fair few internal interruptions are procedural, things like writing a commit message. I took a big point as being that you should design your work processes to help maintain flow.
You said this so much better than me! These were the ones I was thinking more of when writing my comment, rather than all the distractions of a noisy brain. I agree entirely with folks here that those are not in any way easy to overcome. (Though still easier to overcome in the absence of lots of external interruptions.)
As a long time meditator, I’m not sure what you find amusing.
Are you saying you have more control of what other people do than your own mind? If not, what are you objecting to in saying that it’s easier to control yourself than others?
I’m really struggling not to see your comment as living down to stereotypes: vapidly smug.
After enough hours of meditation practice it becomes quite clear that one's mind is ungovernable at best. We can just hope to hold a clear intention (meditation practice in a nutshell) and return to the task whenever internal or external interruptions arise. Perhaps more and more parts of the mind will align with the intention. Hopefully the mind gets unified over time and as a result flow states can be experienced.
The person whose comment you're replying to was probably highlighting the fact that this process is not as predictable as the parent comment alluded to.
But there’s empirical results, from sports to military to meditation — you can train focus.
That makes it easier to maintain your focus, as the person originally said. A few cute euphemisms don’t mitigate that demonstrated reality; and so I’m left confused still —
You’re mocking someone pointing out fact with a quip.
I was recently at a meditation retreat, and a group of meditators much more advanced than me universally agreed that an apt description of their minds was "like a box of ferrets".
The illusion that you control your chain of thought vanishes pretty quickly with meditation. The reality is that your attention shifts rapidly (especially between different senses) and that most of those shifts aren't under direct conscious control.
It's almost like the facade of mental control is a sieve that tries to exclude the chaos and let something coherent flow through... And you can't even be certain how it accomplishes that. It's a mystery where the nonsense and sense even comes from, too.
Somehow we mistake the sieve for free will, or that it's even a fully conscious mechanism. But it "just happens". It's very strange stuff.
Some people like to project their problems into the rest of the population. Someone that has never achieved a major capacity to direct their attention will believe that it is not a skill they can attain. If they find someone with such a skill then they are “oh so gifted”, completely dismissing all the training and effort that said person has put into themselves. Timeless dialectic.
"My boss is always interrupting me with questions, and the office is very noisy. There's no easy fix for either of those external things, so you're lucky that all you have to deal with is internal ADHD and tinnitus!" /s
But you still have to deal with those internal issues in a noisy distracting office! Being interrupted more by other people doesn't make it easier to manage internal struggles, it is a strictly additive difficulty.
Point is, external interruptions are trivial to deal with compared to internal struggles. You can wear ANC headphones in the office and negotiate focus time with your boss. You can change your boss, or your job, or restructure your work around interruptions. Point is, you have options that are sure to work, and tend to not require much upkeep; many are just "fire and forget" fixes.
That's almost never the case with internal struggles. You can't negotiate your ADHD away. There's no mental "ANC headphones" equivalent to shut the bees buzzing in your head up. You're lucky if the problem is something that responds to pharmacotherapy. That means there's actually something you can do to fix it that has even a snowball's chance in hell of working.
I really think "trivial" is massive hyperbole here. Like most people commenting here, I have deep struggles with my own mind, I relate extremely strongly to all the things people are saying here about this.
But things like negotiating across a power imbalance, finding and switching managers, teams, groups, switching jobs entirely... these are not trivial things! These are also extremely stressful things for which I don't think the word "trivial" gets anywhere near being an appropriate word choice.
Yes, the headline term was never truly defined for use. Past the headline it didn't get used until almost half way through and then assumed you knew what was meant by it. Only near the end were there hints as to what the writer was referencing.
Good job pulling out a very plausible interpretation though. We talk about this in our dev meetings and attempt to proactively identify and resolve sources. Having well defined and coherent contexts improved our work and the emotional experiences of doing it. This has been helping me recapture the joy of coding.
Shouldn't have taken starting a company fellow business leaders.
> The frustrating thing about external interruptions is the inability to control them. [...] The good news for these internal interruptions is that it should be much easier to control them.
Interestingly, I feel the exact opposite. I'm aware that it's not always possible or socially acceptable to do so, but at least in theory you can always make a choice to ignore or tune out other people. Ignoring the stuff that is going on in your own head is IMHO much harder.
Yeah I clearly worded this poorly. What I meant to say is that it should be much easier to control only the internal interruptions, compared to the necessity to control both the external ones and the internal ones. That is, the existence of external interruptions doesn't make the internal ones go away, they're just additive on top, which can only make things more difficult.
I am under the impression that its harder to control internal interruptions. Like the quote from st.augustine, 'the mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.'
I spent a long time thinking about why I always end up being the guy that people feel comfortable interrupting. I’m never the nicest guy in the office, I’m not always the cleverest, especially when I’m trying to do something else. But I do seem to recover better from external distractions than most people.
Mostly because my life is a constant struggle against internal distractions, so my coping mechanisms are more evolved.
> I think this point is a bit obscured by the article's use of this "fragmented thinking" terminology, which does not do a good job of defining before building an argument on top of it.
I totally agree with you that the article didn't explicitly define it, but I had the opposite experience reading it. For me, sans definition, could very quickly imagine what they were talking about because it started resonating for me almost immediately.
> The frustrating thing about external interruptions is the inability to control them. Things like turning off notifications and putting on headphones are mechanisms to reduce that frustration by imposing control over those interruptions.
This is partly why it started resonating for me right away. I currently share a semi-private office with another senior engineer. Lately he's been spending a good chunk of his time working on higher-level systems planning work and I've been spending most of my time working on very specific complex low-level work. The questions are sometimes frustrating because they'll interrupt my flow state, but... only sometimes. I've been chewing on that for a couple of weeks now, actually, because I hadn't yet figured out why he could sometimes ask me questions and it would have almost zero effect on me while other times it would have a massive negative effect.
The article nailed it, on reflection: the effect size of being interrupted with a question, for me, is proportional to how far away from the problem I'm working on is. If I'm digging into some of the autopilot code and get asked a question about GPS or IMUs, it is absolutely no problem to think about the question and answer it. If, though, it's a question about, say, a battery or the charging system, I'll get the "black cloud evaporating" phenomenon from the comic in the article. And it happens so quickly that by time I can even just answer "sorry, I don't have brain capacity to think about that right now" it's too late.
Regarding internal interruptions, classic Pomodoro technique (the one with a kitchen timer and a sheet of paper) deals with them this way: there is an 'interruptions' section on the sheet, and whenever an interrupting thought occurs, it's written down to that section and a dot is put above current Pomodoro. This way one is confident that no important ideas are missed and also can track the number of interruptions per Pomodoro.
Tying this to one of the author's arguments: Many internal interruptions occur because of the type of work we are doing is not right. I find myself distracted when my task is too complex, vague, or limiting. The task needs to have the right balance of difficulty and creativity to make it "flow-statable".
I use Cold Turkey to block my habbit of scrolling time-wasting sites when I should be reflecting harder on what it is needed to solve the issue at hand.
I think this is true, but I was also thinking about more specific things. Like identifying, "ok, what do I commonly do in my own workflow that interrupts me from what I'm working on". In another comment I used the example of wanting to see the results of something I just did, but having to wait for something that executes slowly. Another example of something I'm guilty of is going down premature refactoring rabbit holes.
But all of the general good mental health stuff you mentioned helps maintain the right focused mental state to introspect about where you're getting interrupted, figuring out how to avoid those things, and then actually avoiding them.
Ha ha yeah. Let me just remove all that childhood trauma and PTSD, then we'll get this train of thought right back on track. Why didn't I think of that sooner?
However, I do think this is an insightful point! I think these "internal interruptions" are indeed a big problem for me, and one I don't think about nearly as much, but will try to more now that I've read this article.
The frustrating thing about external interruptions is the inability to control them. Things like turning off notifications and putting on headphones are mechanisms to reduce that frustration by imposing control over those interruptions.
The good news for these internal interruptions is that it should be much easier to control them. But it requires being aware of the problem! So I'm thankful to this article for making this more top of mind for me.